Another question asked at the PR luncheon I attended last Wednesday was, “Do you allow people to post anonymous comments on your blog?” I didn’t get to answer that one in the interests of time, so I thought I’d answer it here.
I keep the comments feature on my blog turned off. I’m in the minority of the bloggers who do this, although I’m by no means alone. For example, Seth Godin, who writes what is possibly the most widely-read blog on the Web, keeps comments turned off too. Here are the reasons I don’t enable the comments feature:
1) To protect the people I know. By continuing to write a blog that has gotten so popular, I’m consciously making the choice to put myself out there, to open myself up to public scrutiny. However, even though this blog has kind of become an unofficial Downtown Memphis blog, it’s still my personal journal as well, and I write about people I know. I feel it’s kind of my duty to protect them as I write about them. Whether I write about good friends like Mikey the Camera Nazi or the Nuh-Uh Girl, or people I don’t always see eye to eye with like MegHanZilla from Big Foot or bartender Brittney from the Saucer, I don’t want to provide a public forum where people can post details of their lives that they’d prefer to remain private. When I write about people, I know how far is too far and am careful not to cross that line, but I can’t be sure anonymous commenters will do the same.
2) Because I hate racism. Read the comments on Commercial Appeal stories or Thaddeus Matthews’ blog, and you’ll get an idea why I’m not fond of comments on my own blog. In this polarized city, discussion of any controversial news story – be it crime or politics or whatever – inevitably turns to race. People have the right under the First Amendment to express racism and prejudice, I suppose, but I’m under no obligation to provide space on the Web for them to do it.
Surely the discussion on panhandling would have drawn a lot of racist comments, if I had allowed them on my blog. However, it became clear that discussion on that issue was needed, so a friend and I started a forum, separate from my blog, where discussion was carefully controlled in order to keep it constructive. A lot has been done about the panhandling problem as a result.
3) I don’t have time to deal with comments. I haven’t checked my tracker in about a week, but the last time I did, I saw that a week ago Tuesday was an all-time high, with 1,795 views in one day, counting RSS readers. I worry that if I turned comments on, it would take an hour of my day or more to moderate them, to get rid of the inevitable comment spam, and to respond to those that needed a response. It’s just not the best use of my time, time that I could otherwise spend building websites or going out and finding new information to blog about.
4) I want to keep control over what events get mentioned. In the roundtable Wednesday I described the blog as a “clearinghouse for information about Downtown,” but I don’t want to mention everything. I don’t want people getting on here and cluttering the blog with events in Cordova that aren’t relevant to Downtowners. I don’t want people getting on here and promoting causes I don’t support (such as Young Republicans, or far worse, that awful white supremacist conference that was in town last weekend). I don’t want businesses that are known for lousy customer service to get on here and promote themselves. I put my e-mail address on the blog, and if people want events mentioned, they can get in touch with me and I’ll make the call whether or not to post them.
It’s true that many people (including my co-panelists Wednesday) see a blog as a conversation between the blogger and the readers. To some extent, I lose that aspect of the blog by keeping comments turned off. However, I don’t think I lose it entirely – many of my readers e-mail me, and I e-mail back, and have become good friends with many readers over the years. They’ve provided a lot of useful information that has added value to the blog – it’s just that, as I stated above, I want to maintain control over what information actually goes on there.
In summary, it’s a personal decision. It just feels right. There are lots of local bloggers who do enable the comments feature, and even allow anonymous comments, and I have great respect for them for doing so. It’s just my own personal decision that this blog will run more smoothly with the comments off.
More answers questions from the PR roundtable to come.